Night Prey

Paul took a statement.”
    “Yeah, but we never heard any more . . . Wait, I’ll get Paul.”
    She went back inside and Lucas waited, avoiding eye contact with the two people on the porch. They knew it, and seemed to think he was amusing. Every once in a while he’d accidentally make eye contact and either nod or lift his eyebrows, which made him feel stupid.
    A moment later, the stringy teenager came back with a stocky dark-haired man, who looked closely at Lucas and then croaked once, querulously. Heavy oversize glasses with thick lenses made his eyes seem moonlike. He stood under the porch light, and the light made a halo of his long hair.
    “I don’t sign,” Lucas said.
    The blonde said, “No shit. So what do you want to know?”
    “Just what he saw. We got a report with a license number, but the number was an impossible one. The state doesn’t allow vulgarities or anything that might be a vulgarity, so there is no plate that says ASS on it.”
    The girl opened her mouth to say something, then turned to Johnston, her hands flying. A second later, Johnston shook his head in exasperation and began signing back.
    “He says the guy at the police station is a jerk,” the blonde said.
    “I don’t know him,” Lucas said.
    The blonde signed something, and Johnston signed back. “He was afraid that they might have messed up, but that jerk they had at the police station just couldn’t sign,” she said, watching his hands.
    “It wasn’t ASS? ”
    “Oh, yeah. That’s why they remembered it. This guy almost ran over them, and Paul saw the plate, and started laughing, because it said ASS , and the guy was an ass.”
    “There aren’t any plates that say ASS. ”
    “How about ass backwards?”
    “Backwards?”
    She nodded. “To Paul, it doesn’t make much difference, frontwards or backwards. He just recognizes a few words, and this ASS popped right out at him. That’s why he remembered it. He knew it was backwards. He tried to explain all this, but I guess not everything got through. Paul said the guy at the police station was an illiterate jerk.”
    “Jesus. So the plate was SSA? ”
    “That’s what Paul says.”
    Lucas looked at Paul, and the deaf man nodded.

27
    LUCAS, ON THE phone, heard Connell running down the hall and smiled. She literally skidded into the office. Her face was ashen, bare of any makeup; tired, drawn.
    “What happened?”
    Lucas put his hand over the receiver. “We maybe got a break. Remember those deaf people? St. Paul got the license number wrong.”
    “Wrong? How could they be wrong?” she demanded, fist on her hips. “That’s stupid.”
    “Just a minute,” Lucas said, and into the phone, “Can you shoot that over? Fax it? Yeah. I’ve got a number. And listen, I appreciate your coming in. I’ll talk to your boss in the morning, and I’ll tell him that.”
    “What?” Connell demanded when he hung up.
    Lucas turned in the chair to face her. “The deaf guy who saw the plate—the translation got screwed up. The translator couldn’t sign, or something. I looked at that report a half-dozen times, and I kept thinking, how could they screw that up? And I never went back and asked until tonight. The plate was SSA —ass backwards.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “Believe it.”
    “It can’t be that simple.”
    “Maybe not. But there are a thousand SSA plates out there, and two hundred and seventy-two of them are pickups. And what I got from the deaf guy sounded pretty good.”
    Anderson came in with two paper cups full of coffee. He sat down and started drinking alternately from the two cups. “You get the stuff?”
    “They’re faxing it to you.”
    “There oughta be a better way to do this,” Anderson said. “Tie everything together. You oughta get your company to write some software.”
    “Yeah, yeah, let’s go get it.”
    Greave, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, caught up with them as they walked through the darkened hallways to Anderson’s cubicle in homicide. Lucas explained to him as they walked along the hall. “So we’ll look at everything Anderson can pump out of his databases. Looking for a cop, or anybody with a prison record, particularly for sex crimes or anything that resembles cat burglary.”

    AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning, having found nothing at all, Lucas and Connell walked down to the coffee machine together.
    “How’re you feeling?”
    “A little better today. Yesterday wasn’t so good.”
    “Huh.” They watched the